Tag: education

Celebrating 50 years of research from Journal of Philosophy of Education

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How to celebrate the 50th birthday of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (JOPE)? We made a start by looking though every print copy of every Issue of the Journal’s 50 volumes and reading many papers.

We discovered papers way ahead of their time, as well as long threads of argument which we followed through many Issues, a 20-year-old page-turner of a paper on assessment, Alasdair MacIntyre in conversation about education. We had some surprises. Going by how often his name appears in titles and abstracts of papers, Nietzsche is, after Dewey, the philosopher most frequently referred to by contributors. In the first 10 volumes 50% of the Issues had no women contributors. By the most recent decade this had dwindled to 3%. How had that happened? We also looked for the most popular and least popular topics and were amazed at what we discovered.

It soon dawned on us that the very best way of marking our 50th anniversary was to offer readers something like the experience we ourselves had been having. Our Collection, The Journal 1966- 2016, is intended to do that. The papers it contains are not necessarily the best, the most cited or the most popular, but ones chosen for their power to introduce readers to the wealth of material in this rich Archive. The 25 papers each have a Note, calledContext and Connections, with hyperlinks to help readers, using the Wiley Online Library Tools, to explore their research and teaching interests in the Archive. An Editorial elaborates on insights we gained from working in the Archive, as well as sketching a brief history of JOPE.

But this Virtual Special Issue is not just a collection of papers with notes attached. In Video Interviews two former Editors, Richard Smith and Paul Standish, and a current Assistant Editor, Doret de Ruyter, talk about how they see JOPE and its future. Judith Suissa, another Assistant Editor, interviews John White, whose first contribution was in 1970 and his most recent in 2016. Morwenna Griffiths comments on JOPE and gender and the PESGB as a place for women to do philosophy. Michael Hand introduces the Impact pamphlet series. Darren Chetty, Andrea English and Mary Healy talk about presenting papers at the PESGB Annual Conference – where many JOPE papers start their life – and their experience of submitting papers to JOPE. And we, as co-editors, talk about how we made our selection and speculate about how we think readers might use it.

With the final day of June, LGBTQ Pride Month comes to a close for 2016. The Wiley Blackwell Team hopes to serve the LGBTQ Community by continuing the much needed discussion. As a reminder, all of the curated research collections for Pride Month will be freely available through July 31.

With the final day of June, LGBTQ Pride Month comes to a close for 2016. Just last year, same-sex marriage was federally legalized in the United States. In sharp contrast, this year’s pride month was shadowed by the devastation of the Orlando shootings. We were all painfully reminded that despite great strides made by the LGBTQ community, hate and inequality still run rampant. Through this grim reality, the outpour of love and support that emerged from such a violent act of hate is a testament of hope and strength.

Thanks for visiting us each week this month to continue the necessary discussion on LGBTQ rights and issues. As a reminder, all of the curated research collections for Pride Month will be freely available through July 31.

Do you remember when you first learned what the word ‘gay’ meant? Maybe you had a classmate with two mothers, maybe you saw it on TV, or maybe you heard it being used as an insult on the playground. It’s possible that your first encounter with the LGBTQ spectrum involved an open-minded and mediated conversation with adults, but it’s also possible that you had to discover it on your own and deduce meaning based on context, even if that context was an insult.

There is a pressing need to educate about the LGBTQ experience, through events and forums like this one, but also throughout childhood. It is our responsibility to teach children tolerance instead of prejudice. But who is responsible for this education? Should it be built into curricula or is it the role of the family and the parents to educate on this topic?

LGBTQ education is an uphill battle because of a lack of resources. And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about same-sex penguins mating and raising a baby (based on a true story of penguins at a zoo), is consistently one of the most banned books in the United States. It joins the ranks of the few books published about the LGBTQ experience for children, most of which are frequently banned in libraries and schools. The lack of accessibility to these teaching resources is hugely detrimental to LGBTQ education.

The importance of LGBTQ education in an open and accepting environment cannot be overstated. How can classrooms and families work together to teach children about the LGBTQ experience? How can we ensure that children—both LGBTQ and not—never have to learn about what ‘gay’ means from an insult on the playground?

We encourage you to share your thoughts and comments on this post below. If you’re interested on reading scholarly content, made free this month only to support the continuation of conversations surrounding the LGBT Community.

‘The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl”,’ the American politician Shirley Chisholm once said. Exposed in this insight is the miraculous power of language; all that is required for something so fateful to be determined is not biological nature, not even social imposition, but, simply, speech. So seemingly simple is this mechanism, in fact, that some are doing their best to change it. It was revealed this week that a pre-school in Sweden has decided that the use of gender-specific pronouns such as ‘him’ (‘han’) and ‘her’ (‘hon’) is to be prohibited, in favour of gender-neutral terms, in an attempt to reduce the effects of linguistically determined gender-stereotyping.

The school, aptly name Egalia, is tackling an issue which has been firmly on the feminist agenda since Dale Spender’s influential book Man Made Language appeared in 1980. There Spender argued that, far from passively capturing the way that the world appears to us, language actively constructs the way that the world is. More specifically, the state of language, according to Spender, structures the world in a way that promotes males and inhibits females, whether by exclusion, alienation, control, or construction. The claim was supported by the famous studies in linguistics carried out by the American anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose extensive research on Native American languages led to the hypothesis that the structure of language restricts and determines our cognitive categories. It is hard to report an event in English without using the tense-marked words that the grammar requires, and it is hard to encode a fact in Hopi without marking its testimonial status, that is, whether it is first-hand knowledge, second-hand, third-hand, and so on, as required by the structure of the language. Importantly, it makes it hard to think outside of these limits, and, consequently, hard to behave outside of them. The way that we mark gender according to our grammatical structure is no different, an assumption which the new Egalia policy operates on. Continue reading “Undoing Gender: New Experiments in Social Deconstruction”

The Journal of Applied Philosophy will henceforth award an annual prize of £1000 to the best article published in the year’s volume. The first award will be made in respect of Volume 28 (2011). The judgement as to the best article will be made by the editors of the journal.

Journal of Applied Philosophy provides a unique forum for philosophical research which seeks to make a constructive contribution to problems of practical concern. Open to the expression of diverse viewpoints, the journal brings critical analysis to these areas and to the identification, justification and discussion of values of universal appeal. Journal of Applied Philosophy covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, policy, law, politics, economics and education.

A paper recently published online in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) has generated lively discussion on how the educational use of Twitter can affect college student engagement and grades. The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades by R Junco, G Heiberger and E Loken was published in November last year. The paper ‘provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilise faculty into a more active and participatory role’ (quoted from the abstract).

However, a JCAL reader, Dr Ellen Murphy, has raised some interesting issues about the paper, particularly about the language that is used to describe cause and effect, in a letter she wrote to the JCAL Editor, Charles Crook. Rather than being published in JCAL itself, we think the debate and correspondence between the authors, Dr Murphy and the JCAL Editor is better aired via this blog.

JCAL Editor’s responseLetter to the Editor in response to The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades (E. Murphy)

This letter was submitted with a view to publication in the journal. Our advice on submissions does include the possibility of such correspondence. However, in my 8-year tenure as Editor, this is the first time I have had to consider that possibility. Moreover, ‘letters’ seem scarce items across the whole history of the journal. On the other hand, it is certainly Continue reading “Can Twitter be used as an educational tool?”

Stephen E. Schmid is the author of Climbing – Philosophy for Everyone: Because It’s There. Stephen is also Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Rock County. His current research focuses on motivation in sport and education. In the philosophy of sport, he has published and presented on the role of motivation in the conception of play. Stephen has been rock climbing and mountaineering for more than 20 years.

Why did you decide to edit a book on climbing and philosophy?
I had the idea to pursue the climbing and philosophy book for a year before I approached Wiley-Blackwell with the idea. The book idea seemed like a great way to merge my two passions. In addition, I had started to pursue some research in the Philosophy of Sport and examples from climbing proved relevant to the problem I was pursuing. The merging of climbing and philosophy seemed like an obvious move. Continue reading “Interview: Climbing and Philosophy”